Various tasks cause data to be transferred or copied over a network. Some tasks are more important than others. For example, it may be more important to service storage requests from user applications than to copy data for a periodic backup or other background task. Even different data transfers for the same type of background task may vary in importance. Backup of mission critical data may be more important than standard business data or non-critical data.
When different data transfers or different types of data are treated similarly, a less important data transfer may take up bandwidth of a more important data transfer. For example, a data transfer for a real-time or user-facing task may be slowed or interrupted by a background data transfer. Slowing or interrupting a data transfer of a real-time or user-facing task may directly impact a user or storage client or a data transfer of non-critical data may impact a data transfer of mission critical data.